You can setup wildcard alias in fastmail (https://fastmail.com) and literally create addresses on the fly when signing up/sharing your email.

Fastmail has a really nice subdomains feature - I have an alias in fastmail of 'shop@mydomain.com'. Any email for XXX@shop.mydomain.com gets delivered to shop+XXX@mydomain.com. Better than catchall, because all the spam gets sent to JohnSmith@mydomain.com, which is dropped.

But you can't delete that alias if you start receiving spam on it, can you?

Also like realemail+alias@gmail.com, this is really transparent to a spammer and gives away the real email.

The benefit it has is that the 'shop.' subdomain can't be guessed from the DNS records. I get a lot of spam to <randomname>@mydomain.com.

Of course, if someone sees my email address, they could certainly infer a new one. But I'll deal with that if and when I get singled out. I don't think the spammers often actually look at the millions of addresses they use.

If I start getting spam on a particular alias, I can set up filtering rules to delete them.

Wow, this is great feature, thanks for the tip! :)

I use Google Apps for Work on my domain, which lets me forward all email to any address on that domain to my inbox. That way I can use adobe@ryanplant.net, github@ryanplant.net, fitbit@ryanplant.net, etc.

I do this exact same trick and have been using it for years. It led to a couple of brief and somewhat awkward phone calls with local business owners when I asked them rather pointedly about them sharing my information with third parties.

I also take this one step further and have inbox rules to automatically send all promotional email (from sites I'm interested in) to the trash folder. If I want a coupon for a website I frequent, I'll just search my trash for the latest offers from that company. Google conveniently purges messages from the trash folder every 30 days or so, and I don't have to worry about a massive backlog of promos.

A Small Orange does this cheerfully, even for the smallest shared hosting plan. You can then go into cPanel to configure a catch-all account for the domain you're using.

Biggest downside to ASO: you have to pay $7/yr extra on domain registrations to make them private. So I register with Hover and host with ASO.

mailhero.io lets you set a username, then anything sent to *.username@mailhero.io is forwarded to an e-mail you choose. It's only somewhat an e-mail host at the moment (added a few weeks ago), and it has stated that the hosting is only temporarily free, but if you already have a host this can give the feature without requiring any form of migration.

There was an HN discussion about it fairly recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361

The problem is, I have yet to someone who accepts '+' in email address.